Tea
Party For Two
(the second part of Art Hyland's series on the new American
revolutionaries)

“...the Big
Government plan of the new millennium isn’t playing well in
Peoria,
if it ever really did.”

Although
all national polls are now leaning conservative, what is behind
those
results is the combination of steadfast conservative momentum via the
new elephant in the room--the Tea Party, coupled with the
dissolution
of the short-lived Obama phenomenon premised upon the myth he was
the
political messiah. As Ronald Reagan famously
summed it up
decades ago, government isn’t the solution to the problem, government
IS the problem, and this is finally becoming clearer to a wider
spectrum of citizens who have noticed their neighbors, friends,
relatives and themselves losing jobs, financial security, confidence
and optimism. Conservatives, independents and fiscally-concerned
liberals have joined together in this century’s rediscovery of
Reagan’s maxim, resurrected by theTea Party movement.

What
initially motivated the Tea Party was the incessant, unrepentant
spending sprees of a Pelosi/Reid-led Congress and a newly-elected
President Obama anxious to sign anything this Congress put before him.
There have been divisions within the conservative movement in
past
decades that liberals exploited, such as the pro/anti-abortion
debate, among others, but ever since Congress and President Obama
initiated multiple trillion dollar spending bills beginning January
2009, conservatives, as well as a growing number of independents and
liberals have swarmed together to push back against what they
considered fiscal insanity on a massive, nation-killing scale.

The
Greatest Generation’s kids are finally fighting the fight their genes
were always capable of but were mesmerized by decades of easy money,
perpetually inclined markets, and a technological circus of toys to
play with. If the Tea Party at first consisted of older Americans, it
was because they ultimately realized their legacy to THEIR children was
about to be a pile of debt with nothing to show for it but a
recessionary economy for the next two generations. In short, they were
embarrassed by and fearful of what they had allowed this nation to
become, and reacted en masse using the original means available to
Americans--the Constitution.

Their
well-founded fear inspired and has propelled the Tea Party movement,
despite the efforts by the mainstream media to castigate them as first
un-noteworthy, then extreme, then racist, and finally, politically
powerful. In reality, the Tea Party movement was pure
self-preservation--a grassroots movement unlike any that has taken
place in America since perhaps its founding. Unlike the late 1920s
during the now-labeled Great Depression where
much of the
citizenry then was ripe for asking government to feed, clothe and
provide them work, an awakening number of this century’s Great
Recession citizenry is not taking that government bait.

They’ve learned
it comes with a sharp hook.

Instead, they are calling for
self-reliance, independence and a return to the doctrines of our
Founders, as articulated in the Constitution itself, especially the
primary concept of limited government. In the Depression era, when
control of information was very concentrated, there was a public
willingness to blame big industry and big banks as the culprits
whereupon the accepted antidote was bigger government, which President
Roosevelt and
his Congress were eager to provide. Today, although Congress and
President Obama have arbitrarily created the legislative means for vast
government control, essentially copying the same formula as in the 30s,
the 2010 public now believes big government not
only
caused the problems we’re experiencing, but have made things even worse
via unprecedented federal spending and regulations, which they have
seen with their own eyes has proven to be disatrous.

On
the other hand, liberals, having experienced the highs associated with
the election of a liberal Congress in 2006 to electing a Black, liberal
president in 2008, are now witnessing their lows--watching their
leadership totally out of control, out of touch with the average
citizen, having risked all their political marbles on one stimulus
spending bill after another, with other legislation regarding health,
energy and the environment to usher in even more spending and
government controls in the future.

In
short, the Big Government plan of the new millennium isn’t playing well
in Peoria, if it ever really did. Democrat leaders, who delivered big
spending, big legislation and therefore big government, are publicly
pleased, but large parts of their liberal constituency are jumping off
the bandwagon as fast as they joined up just a few short years ago, and
they’re doing so because of the facts: liberalism doesn’t, and can’t,
work except in their minds. The promises of slick slogans, Hope &
Change, or We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, are hollow and
distant memories. Reality--the logic of arithmetic--has caught up very
quickly to expose the fallacy of the “spend ourselves into prosperity”
scheme (previously believed a strategy). First confusion, and now
apathy, on the Left, coupled with a determination on the Right--both
influenced by the fiscal nightmare facing this nation--have brought the
electorate into the current political state favoring conservatives.

But
it’s more than just a movement of the political pendulum. The promise
that was Obama (fundamental transformation of America), the promise
that was Pelosi (the most ethical Congress in history), the promise
that was Big Government (copy the European model), the promise of Green
( save the world from global warming)--these promises have turned out
to be balloons that have burst, and with them the inertia and the
political energy that requires constant replenishment to live, but has
suddenly become starved of food because there never was any nourishment
in the first place.

Numbers
don’t lie, science ultimately must turn toward objectivity, and perhaps
most importantly, the people upon whom the liberals depended--the
Obamas, the Pelosis, the Reids, the Waxmans, the Franks and the Dodds
et al have been exposed as fraudsters out to gain or retain power for
power’s sake.

This nation,
if it is to remain the republic it was founded to be, will never be
willing to accept power at any cost. Governing balance because of
citizen control was designed into the Constitution to help prevent the
ever constant threat of tyrannical power. If we’re lucky, each American
generation will find the willpower to accept this God-given
responsibility to the nation to which they belong.